Failed visions of civic virtue

In “This Is the City,” a study of politics, culture and media in Los Angeles over the last century or so, Ronald J. Schmidt Jr. writes with a kind of confidence and verve that is rare in academic scholarship. He conjures up several notable figures of 19th and 20th century L.A. -- Los Angeles Times Publisher Harrison Gray Otis, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer and Police Chief William Parker, among others -- and he shows exactly how these willful and powerful men shaped the ways in which their fellow Angelenos saw themselves.

Not that “This Is the City” is entirely free of academic jargon. Schmidt, a professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine, defines the goal of his book as examining “the centrality of [a] mimetic tradition in the politics of Los Angeles.” By “mimetic tradition,” he means the effort of influential and powerful men to “fix a stable vision of civic virtue” and thereby provide a “blueprint” for the rest of us to follow in living our lives.

“Indeed, throughout the history of Southern California, political and economic leaders have demanded that the virtue -- and perhaps the survival -- of the city depends on this imitative civic education,” Schmidt explains at the outset of his short but potent book.

Some nonacademic readers may be put off by such throat-clearings, but the rest of “This Is the City” is considerably more accessible and, in fact, quite lively. Schmidt, for example, shows in vivid detail how Otis used the newspaper he owned to conjure up the vision of “a metropolis of self-made men” while acting purely in his own self-interest to make a fortune in land speculation and water politics. “The citizens worthy to rule in Los Angeles,” argues Schmidt, “would be those who could successfully imitate and even exceed his own model.”

Viewed through this lens, Otis’ bitter struggle against organized labor takes on new meanings. The open shop, in his eyes (and his words), represented “the right of every man to be a man, and against the infamy of making any man or body of men in America industrial slaves.” And it allows us to see that Otis regarded his role in bringing water to Southern California as proof of the righteousness of his vision, a notion he expressed in biblical terms:

“[A] great river has been turned from its course -- a course that it followed since the hand of God raised the mountains and laid the oceans in their place on the morn of creation -- and brought down to serve the people of Los Angeles who are here today, and the millions more who are to come tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

Something of the same impulse was at work in the imagination of MGM mogul Mayer. “Mayer was intent on engaging American audiences in the imitation of exemplary American virtue,” Schmidt writes. But Mayer was not content with projecting an idealized American way of life as he did in the Andy Hardy movies. He also insisted that “his actors dress, behave, and vote the right way” -- that is, his way. Thus, for example, he scolded Clark Gable for his marital infidelities and admonished Maureen O’Sullivan to write home more often.

Perhaps the clearest and most convincing example of Schmidt’s premise is his study of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “successful foray into popular culture” under Chief Parker in the 1950s. Parker’s own rhetoric supports Schmidt’s premise. “By disassociating Virtue from our search for prosperity, we threaten to follow the course of Babylon [and] Rome,” Parker declared shortly after taking his new post. “We need a great moral leader to pull us from the brink.” And he found a way to instruct the citizenry in civic virtue by collaborating with television actor and producer Jack Webb, creator of “Dragnet” and its iconic cop, Joe Friday.

“A model of civic excellence, Joe was the sort of citizen Parker argued viewers should be like ... ,” explains Schmidt. “Parker provided Webb with the details of his vision; with mimetic perfection, Webb provided the audience with those details.”

Ultimately, Schmidt judges all these efforts to have been failures. Otis, according to Schmidt, did not even succeed in inspiring his own successor and son-in-in-law, Harry Chandler, to emulate him: “[T]he self-made-man tradition ... died with him.” Mayer courted the Republican movers and shakers of Southern California but remained an outsider: “A Jewish immigrant with a mimetic devotion to American narratives of virtue, Mayer committed himself to preserving a vision of civic community to which he could never fully belong.” And Parker’s public career went down in flames. “Parker’s loss of faith in emulation and Los Angeles,” writes Schmidt, “came to a head in 1965, during the uprising in Watts.”

Schmidt closes his book with musings on Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” a movie in which “replicants” are programmed to think, feel and act like human beings -- “a world of unconscious imitation.” And he concludes with the alarming and sobering notion that generation upon generation of flesh-and-blood Angelenos have been subjected to a similar kind of programming by highly controlling men who have tried to tell the rest of us how to live. Like the characters in “Blade Runner,” he suggests, the only way to survive is to break the grip of the forces that shape us. *